“You have to have staff in place who have the skill to recognize that a particular issue is an issue that can surface during an election and they’ve got these types of people in there now,” said Keith Beardsley, a former PMO deputy chief of staff for issues management and now a partner at True North Public Affairs, in an interview with The Hill Times.
“They’re going to be really on their toes on issues that come up, and they’re not going to let things slide. I think they’re going to identify key issues much sooner before they end up blowing up in their face,” Mr. Beardsley said.
“It’s something that they’ve needed over the last several months as well. If they had been able to look ahead, … would you [the PMO] have sent the Prime Minister out to defend Pamela Wallin? I don’t think so. You would have said, ‘Okay this doesn’t look good, before we say anything and support her, let’s let the story run a little bit, let’s get more facts,’” he said.
Mr. Novak, 36, is Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) longest-serving staffer and has been at the PMO helm since taking over from former chief of staff Nigel Wright who resigned under a cloud of controversy on May 19 after CTV reported Mr. Wright had written a cheque for $90,000 to Senator Mike Duffy to pay back his inappropriate housing and travel expenses to the Senate. Over the summer, a number of major staffing changes have taken place in the PMO.
Conservative Party director of operations Jenni Byrne, 36, who previously worked in Mr. Harper’s PMO as director of issues management and was national campaign chair for the 2011 election, has returned to the Prime Minister’s Office to serve as one of two deputy chiefs of staff to Mr. Novak, alongside Joanne McNamara. Ms. Byrne is expected to serve as national campaign chair in the 2015 election.
Alykhan Velshi, 29, who had been director of planning in the PMO, has taken over as the PMO’s new director of issues management. The office has been without one since Chris Woodcock left the Langevin Block to serve as chief of staff to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver (Eglinton-Lawrence, Ont.) in August.
Mr. Woodcock was one of three PMO staffers who allegedly knew of the $90,000 personal cheque Mr. Wright wrote to Sen. Duffy to repay ineligible expenses. The others who allegedly knew were legal adviser Benjamin Perrin and executive assistant to the chief of staff David Van Hemmen. Mr. Perrin was the first to leave the PMO and returned to his teaching post at the University of British Columbia in May. Mr. Woodcock left next in mid-August, and, most recently, Mr. Van Hemmen left the PMO and is now a policy adviser to new Minister of State for Finance Kevin Sorenson (Crowfoot, Alta.).
Catherine Loubier recently replaced André Bachand, who is now at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, as a senior adviser for Quebec in the PMO, and Lanny Cardow, who previously worked in the PMO as executive assistant to then chief of staff Ian Brodie, has also returned from the private sector to serve as manager of government advertising.
PMO communications director Andrew MacDougall announced he would be resigning from his role earlier this summer. Mr. MacDougall’s last day was Sept. 6 and he is now set to join a London, England-based public affairs firm.
Joseph Lavoie, who was previously working as director of strategic communications and new media to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird (Ottawa West-Nepean, Ont.), has been hired to the PMO as the new director of strategic communications.
Erin Bonokoski, who had been working as a manager of strategic communications, was recently promoted to serve as deputy director of strategic communications.
“They’re fairly bright, politically attuned, certainly, and, to a certain extent, that was what was missing in the old PMO. People look at the ages and say, ‘They’re all young.’ Well they might be, but they have a wealth of political experience with them and so I don’t see it as a negative,” Mr. Beardsley said. “From Harper’s viewpoint, if he’s saying to Ray, ‘I need people in there who can gear us up for another election that’s coming,’ then he’s [Ray’s] picked a pretty good group to do that.”
Upon Mr. Novak’s appointment as chief of staff, there were concerns raised among Conservative circles about a lack of seniority in the PMO. Conservative sources have described Mr. Novak as a good listener and have predicted that his good rapport and familiarity with the Conservative caucus will help relations between the caucus and the PMO which were shaken last spring when a number of Conservative MPs spoke out about party control, and specifically PMO control, in the House of Commons.
“There will be more authority coming from the PMO now when they deal on issues, because there’s more skill, there’s more knowledge involved,” Mr. Beardsley said. “When you talk to an MP and say, ‘I need you to do this for the following reasons,’ the MP’s going to be able to evaluate it and say, ‘Yeah, this person knows what they’re talking about.’ Whereas before, they would push back—‘Why would I do this, this is dumb.’ So I think there’ll be a different type of interaction between PMO and the MPs simply because you have more knowledgeable people, political knowledge, at the top.”
Yaroslav Baran, a former Conservative staffer and now a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group, said Mr. Novak is bringing in loyal, trusted, and competent people he’s already familiar with and a team who he knows “will gel and operate well” together.
“He appears to be selecting some pretty quality people, and this is part of a larger retooling for the fall,” he said, adding the recent Cabinet shuffle and the expected throne speech this fall is part of that retooling.
Mr. Baran said the “vast majority” of the PMO’s energy this fall is going to go into “crafting a very powerful and very responsive Throne Speech” and “rolling out a robust policy agenda to implement that.” Mr. Baran said he thinks the Throne Speech will focus on “themes” like economic growth, Senate reform “and some additional criminal justice reforms.”
Tim Powers, vice-chair at Summa Strategies, said the PMO is going to want to drive the political agenda in the fall, rather than reacting to it, as they have been this summer. He said the anticipated fall Throne Speech will allow the government to take back control and switch to an offensive game. When the Conservatives first came to power in 2006, they had “five priorities” they wanted to check off, and Mr. Powers said he could see them reverting to that type of score-keeping governance.
“There’s a clear agenda in play,” Mr. Powers said. “I think offense is better than defence. This government, not unlike other governments, plays defense poorly, so I think they’re going to try and regain ground there by setting the agenda as opposed to reacting to the agenda.”
Mr. Powers predicted that agenda will likely include Senate reform, “key economic planks” and some measures possibly related to safety and security.
Mr. Beardsley said considering the apparent “staying power” of new Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau (Papineau, Que.), the PMO is going to have to pay attention to him in the next two years. He said the Conservatives will have to “sharpen” their focus on the Liberals, not necessarily with personal attacks, but by being politically smart and boxing Mr. Trudeau in on certain policies.
“When you’re government you can suck people into say something on a particular issue and because you’re government you can do almost anything you want with the issue, so I can see them trying to pull policy issues out, like they did on the pot one, pull issues out that they can then use to their advantage down the road,” he said.
The Conservatives are also “going to have to balance their attacks” on the opposition parties and also go after NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair (Outremont, Que.), “but not too hard,” Mr. Beardsley said.
“Traditionally, as the Liberals rise, the NDP drop and they end up splitting the vote no matter what, which is what you want [as a Conservative]. They’re going to have to balance out how they deal with each of the parties so they don’t destroy one, which makes the other one that much stronger,” he said.
With Ms. Byrne, Ms. Loubier, and Ms. Bonokoski there are now six women in senior roles in the PMO, compared to previously when there were only four female senior PMO staffers, including deputy chief of staff Ms. McNamara; director of policy Rachel Curran; director of tour and scheduling Deborah Campbell; and press secretary Julie Vaux, who left the office last month to serve as chief of staff to Health Minister Rona Ambrose (Edmonton-Spruce Grove, Alta.). Ms. Byrne was in charge of the Conservative Party’s 2011 election campaign, which resulted in the party’s first majority win, and became the first female to achieve such a feat in Canada.
Elizabeth Roscoe, a national service leader and public affairs expert at Hill and Knowlton Strategies, said this appears to be the first time that there are two female deputy chiefs of staff in the PMO, and said she thinks in addition to Ms. Byrne’s proficiency for caucus relations, Ms. McNamara will “continue a very strong role” in policy development and departmental liaising.
“She’s [McNamara’s] now a very experienced chief of staff after her time with Minister Moore and Oda. She’s been a chief since the beginning of this government,” said Ms. Roscoe, who also said Mr. Novak has “great political judgment.”
Mr. Powers said Mr. Novak has brought in people he trusts, “have experience” and “can deliver” in advance of the next election.
“These guys have delivered,” he said. “Jenni was a senior player in the team that won the election, and most people who have been elected or employed somewhere or another are probably connected directly to Jenni through things she’s done for them or with them or through the work that she’s done to get them elected. So she has a reservoir of power based on her successes in the tasks that she was assigned.”
While Mr. Baran said he suspects the current PMO team will be the same one going into the 2015 election, Mr. Powers said it’s still too early to tell. “Two years is a long time, and those jobs can burn people out, as we’ve seen. I would suspect most of them will be around, but I would suspect there’ll probably be more changes going forward,” Mr. Powers said.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: LAURA RYCKEWAERT
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